Alive & Alright - Sloan (Two Minutes for Music)

In which a Canadian who was a teen in the 90s attempts to write about Sloan in fewer than 25,000 words.

Title: Alive & Alright

Artist: Sloan

Label: Two Minutes for Music

Where I bought it: The online shop on Sloan’s website

Description: “A double live album recorded in front of a small gathering of about 50 fans on February 4th, 2000, performing all of the Between The Bridges album plus one b-side,” also filmed for video in an attempt to find a workaround to the emerging problem of music videos costing more than the budget for entire albums, thinking Canada’s music video channel might possibly play various live recordings in lieu of music videos, which they did not.

To explain why a live album by Sloan, on which they perform the entirety of their 1999 album Between the Bridges for a small audience, might be of interest, one first has to talk about why Sloan is of interest, and I suspect that upon doing so a gulf may emerge between the readers of this newsletter who grew up American v. those who grew up Canadian.

Between the Bridges sold what in the US would be considered an extremely modest 40,000 copies, and what in Canada is considered a gold record. Which is still about half of what their best selling album, One Chord to Another, sold, which is certified platinum in Canada with an absolutely staggering </sarcasm> 80,000 albums sold. So you’d be excused if you’re wondering why a double-live version of BtB would be of interest to me, or anyone, really.

I was 17 years old in 1997, when Sloan’s One Chord to Another came out, and Much Music (Canada’s MTV) played the singles, “The Good in Everyone,” “Everything You’ve Done Wrong,” and “The Lines You Amend” seemingly on repeat. The emergence of alternative music combined with Canada’s ‘Canadian content’ rules to make Sloan ubiquitous at that time. If you weren’t watching them on Much, you heard them on the radio or were watching them perform at local summer festivals. I’ve seen Sloan live at least a dozen times, almost by accident at this point. For the indie-minded, Sloan is a national institution, and for Canadians of that generation, they’re right up there with the Tragically Hip as a universal language.

Between the Bridges marks, in my mind, a pivot for the band, not stylistically, but economically. As they note in the liner notes to this live album, “By the end of Navy Blues (1998),” [which had introduced what I’d thought was a mega-hit “Money City Maniacs,”] … “the time, money and energy spent on our music videos was outweighing the benefits.”

For a naïve 20-year old like me circa 2000, becoming a huge band in Canada was roughly equal to being a huge band in America. Sloan, I thought, were certainly no Nirvana, but perhaps they were a Stone Temple Pilots, or at least a Toad the Wet Sprocket? What I did not understand at the time was that an independent band paying for their promotion out-of-pocket couldn’t afford to produce the music videos required to promote their albums, even if they were one of the best-known rock bands in Canada coming off back-to-back hit records. They were locked out of mainstream success.

As explained in the liner notes, “If we thought the response to the “Losing California” video was muted, it was like a blockbuster hit compared to the reception of the “Friendship” video. I went into Much Music myself and naively told them that we could have a new video for them every week for 13 weeks. I was informed, “That’s not the way it works.” I was also made aware of the lack of production value.”

In Sloan’s relatively impoverished move of filming a live concert and going hat-in-hand to Much to beg them to play it, I was exposed to the harsh truth not just of the music industry, but of the incredible smallness of Canada’s entertainment industry next to the cultural juggernaut that was America. Sloan would soon license with BMG Music Canada, as close to being on a major as they’d been since being signed to Geffen in their early years, but by then the world had changed. They would continue to be nominated for Juno’s (Canada’s Grammy’s) from time to time, but they’d never again ride a wave of public interest to gold or platinum records, and would have to be satisfied with being a beloved group with a devoted fanbase.

And so we’re left with this curiosity, Alive & Alright, which is a vinyl pressing of the audio captured during the video production of Between the Bridges performed in its entirety in 2000 and released in 2023, in what may as well be a different geological era, following what has essentially been the collapse of the mainstream music sales business but also the gradual emergence of collector vinyl sets marketed directly to the faithful and nostalgic. Hi, that’s me!

It’s catnip to those of us who have for years kept a copy of 4 Nights at the Palais Royale in our cars. 4N@PR is another live album recorded at about the same time, in 1998, following the release of Navy Blues when the band was at the height of their powers. It’s a fun artifact, peppered with the hometown audience’s enthusiastic singalongs and song-by-song liner notes by all of the band members that are incredibly charming and funny. And I think it’s interesting, if a bit depressing, to put 4N@PR next to A&A and consider them before-and-after shots of a band about to hit a decline that they didn’t know at the time was to be a hollowing out of the economic model sustaining indie bands everywhere.

Not too long ago, I saw Sloan in San Francisco for the millionth time, I believe performing on a 20th anniversary tour for Navy Blues. The line outside the venue was made up predominantly of gangly white men, many of whom were from Canada and working in the Bay Area for tech companies. Chris and Jay from Sloan walked up and down the line and talked to people, asking where everyone was from. They’ve always seemed like unpretentious and approachable guys, but what the 17-year old me assumed - that this coolness was despite the temptations of incredible fame and wealth - was revealed to wiser, older, sadder me to be the fact that they’d never really had much fame or wealth to speak of.

Sloan are, in the final analysis, what they’ve always been: a great band playing catchy pop-rock songs for fans who know every lyric by heart.